The advancement in technologies is demanding a need for easy and effective development and maintenance of software applications. Easy integration options for software applications are a must for today's distributed & collaborative environment. Legacy applications can also be re-architected to take benefits from the state of the art practices if they can be re-factored with ease.
In Legacy systems functionalities or activities are complex and inter twined. The present invention aims at re architecting them by segregating activities/functionalities into services.
Legacy systems/applications are software applications that have been written some time ago and which do not conform or are not extensible to new or modern software platforms or modern software architectures. For example, a legacy system or application is any system or application implemented and used by a company for a number of years and which became an integral part of running the business. More specifically, it is a system, which persists in use over a large turnover of managers of the system. Such systems or applications run fine, but each new manager has less knowledge of the system or application as time progresses. Examples of such, legacy systems include mainframe applications written in Cobol, AS/400 applications written in RPG etc. Such applications typically contain a great deal of business knowledge. It is often desirable to extract the business knowledge for implementation into a new application on more modern platforms. It is important to note that even software systems programmed for modern platforms may be legacy if they employ legacy design and architecting principles.
It is the object of the invention to modularize the legacy applications into smaller units for better understanding of the business logic contained within the application for various purposes including but not limited to easier maintenance.
It is yet another object of the invention to move legacy applications from monolithic architecture to modern service oriented architecture.
It is yet another object of the invention to migrate legacy applications irrespective of the platforms.
It is the object of the present invention to formulate various service patterns.
Legacy applications typically follow conversational and/or pseudo conversational style of programming containing code that implements presentation layer logic and the business logic in the same program. These programs deal with multiple aspects of the architecture and pose challenges in maintenance such as identifying a problem or adding new feature, as this would be more expensive and a time consuming exercise. These challenges are equally applicable to batch-oriented legacy programs.
It eliminates the task of manual functioning thus facilitating simplicity and saves time. It is a very cost effective measure.
These and other objects, features and advantages will be readily apparent upon consideration of the following detailed description in conjunction with the accompanying drawings.